Ed Said - How dry is dry?

 

Though 71 per cent of the earth is covered in water, 96 per cent of that is salty and of little use to our daily needs, so the big dry continues though it could well be raining cats and dogs by the time this issue is printed.

There are often interesting coincidences attached to natural phenomena. People with no religious affiliation at all are now praying for rain. Coincidentally in a couple of months they could well be praying for the rain to stop and strangely enough – and for some unknown reason – many are looking for someone to blame for the current situation.

Global warming then becomes devil’s advocate, but in a place like Mangawhai only a small number of residents take the time to regulate their usage of tank water until the situation become almost dire.

In our farming life we were always on tank water. A family of parents plus five offspring plus toilet usage plus years of washing nappies on a daily basis and yet never ran completely out of water from a 5000 gallon (20,000 litre) tank. Rural dwellers think differently from their town counterparts.

Little children can shower with an adult. Showers use much less water than running a bath. Two centimetres of water will, left to simmer, cook a whole pot of corn cobs or spuds. A potfull is not required. Families with young children don’t wash nappies these days, they use disposables – the scourge of landfill.

Councils, another scapegoat, are being urged to have ‘emergency meetings’ to set contingency plans in place to store water for just such eventualities as this. Noble indeed but nobody can cover all contingencies when it comes to nature. Some councils that refused water storage permits to home owners are now changing the rules and granting consents. Just today our eminent Minister of Whatever, Shane Jones, has come out berating the Far North Council for failing to futureproof vital water sources in a drought-prone area.

While the Government has put $2 million towards the project he fails to realise he gave a billion dollars to frivolous pursuits from the Provincial Growth Fund. There was no drought at the time so it was probably not seen as important, but surely that is the very reason for a back-up system.

Do we not have insurance ‘just in case’? Storage apart, when we had lower than normal rainfall in winter and spring, the lower water table meant we didn’t have the usual ground water to draw on. Nobody’s fault, just nature. We got over an inch of rain, more in some areas, in early January so does seven weeks really signify a big dry? Different people and different generations see it in different ways. School kids to late teens probably never give water usage a second thought. A young farmer in his thirties recently said on television he’d “never been through a season as dry as this.”

A 70-yearold farmer will see things differently however having seen many seasons just as dire. In my farming memory dating back to the 1950s I recall it not raining from Christmas until Easter on our south Auckland farm.

The ground was parched and bare and at sundown the sky was black with hordes of starlings settling in the paddocks and feeding off the crickets which multiply furiously in such conditions. Droughts of course tend to be localised with parts of Northland experiencing drought in six out of ten years.

In Dargaville the 1982-83 drought began with an uncharacteristically dry October with little significant rain until the following April. Now THAT is a dry spell. Comparatively this is peanuts and just requires householders to be more cogniscent of things we take for granted. The weather wasn’t pleasant pre-Christmas.

We couldn’t wait for summer. Now it’s here, just enjoy it. It’ll change soon enough.

Rob Pooley, Editor